When I was writing poetry all the time it was a constant viewfinder on the world. I often couldn’t walk through the landscape without some bit of reality catching my attention by beauty or irony or brutality or humanness. Camera phones helped me by allocating some of those interactions to visual poems. Many of my video works are these moving poems, and many photos tend to be one stanza works about an encounter out here in reality. Here are three I found recently.

We haven’t spoken in a while,
i was away, or you were away, or we
had stopped talking over a disagreement…?

i’ve seen things since last we spoke.
remember how we used to tell each other everything?

my father died. since last we met.
pancreatic cancer, like patrick swayze.
but dad was no patrick swayze.
he was more like bogart, had he lived too long.

it was not heroic. his death i mean.
it was bed ridden death, long death, medical.
had you been there we could have talked about
the small rebel flag that had blown loose
from his porch, sitting in the grass, in a windy rain.

we would have talked about how he still hated
that i was an atheist, unable to relent
to his jesusgodcreator who would have him suffer
to enter a disneyland of the mind.
a jesusgocreator whom i find empty,
replaced by quantum mechanics and poetry and art,
on my own terms. a reality in place of daydream.

i tell you now that i have written to him
on his facebook account these past 3 months.
i told him things i will not share here with you,
i regret this omission, truly, but we have been estranged.
i think of his account being cancelled any moment,
and that idiot connection i have being broken, a final death.
the internet cares nothing about humanity or life.
its about immediacy. fame. connections but no substance.

it was all very medical. like an injury. a final injury.
i hope we can speak of better things soon,
don’t give up on me. i still see some beauty.
i’ll bring you some, next time we talk.